Thursday, November 20, 2014

Moist Banana Bread

Okay so funny story... There are two ladies at my work that refuse to eat bananas once they have any speckle of brown on it. Brown speckles are the optimal time for eating the bananas! And more nutritional value than when they are green!!

So because of this, one of the ladies gave me an entire hand of bananas... approximately 7 bananas? (Fun fact: a hand of bananas = a bunch like you would get from the store and a finger is just one banana, silly huh?) And then the other lady gave me one that she just couldn't handle trying to eat because it as too mushy. Silly silly ladies! I also had a few ready to use bananas at home that I just hadn't gotten around to making banana bread yet. So now I had ten bananas to make bread with! (the recipe only calls for 2-3 per recipe!) Then my husband decided to eat one of the gross mushy brown bananas instead of the hand that was nice and yellow. (He comes from a family where you eat the stuff going bad first before you eat the nice fresh stuff) Anyway, I wish I would have taken a picture of all the gross brown bananas. And we were getting fruit flies so that is a prime indicator that it is time to make banana bread. (These bananas are about a week fresher than when I made the banana bread. They were pretty brown and gross by the time I got around to it...and this is only half of them...)

The banana bread recipe I use is found here. (It's towards bottom of the page)

I use the full amount of brown sugar and of course, you can't forget the walnuts! I also probably use a little more cinnamon than what is calls for (I love cinnamon btw). Also, please be wary of the cooking times for the bread because I'm pretty sure it lies! I think 1 hr 10 min is way too long. So depending on the size of the loaf, I'll stick to a start time of 30 -45 min and then check it. (overcooked banana bread just isn't as moist and delicious..) I guess if you are making a bunch of loaves you could do a test one, and then once you figure out the optimal cook time, you can implement that on the rest of the loaves. However, most people aren't going to triple the recipe like I had to do. So many bananas!! But I've made this stuff enough where I can almost tell it's done just by looking at it. (Side note: If the middle collapses quite a bit when it's cooling off, it probably should have cooked a little longer.)
As you can see down below, I almost didn't have a bowl large enough to mix the wet and dry mixture. I as actually afraid it was going to overflow...but it was a success and it all fit in one bowl! (Next time, however, I plan on doing a double batch at most. It's a lot easier for mixing purposes.)

And then all my loaves. I did a bunch of minis so I could give them to everyone at work so we wouldn't be stuck eating them. There is also a large loaf in the oven, so there was quite a bit of banana bread.

I am also sad to say that I forgot to take pictures of the finished product. I really just wanted to go to bed at this point!! But everyone at work LOVED loved loved the bread!

And they all know to bring me old bananas so I can make more. :) #nomnomnom